Arcserve CEO to Channel Partners: Data Resilience is the Top Priority for 2023

By Brannon Lacey, CEO, Arcserve

As a channel-focused company, Arcserve focuses on providing value to our partners by bolstering their knowledge and offering solutions that help their customers strengthen their data resilience.

We team up with our channel partners to help organizations protect and recover their most critical asset—data. One opportunity we see for our MSP partners in 2023 is cyber-recovery as a service (CRaaS).

According to IDC, CRaaS is a service whose time has come, especially as ransomware attacks continue unabated. IDC believes CRaaS can yield high-growth opportunities with solid margins for managed services providers (MSPs) that take advantage of it. CRaaS is appealing to customers because it takes the arduous task of backing up data off their hands and provides them with data copies that are immutable and untouchable. As a result, even if a ransomware attack is successful and the current data is overwritten, a customer can quickly and easily recover their information from a very recent point.

With explosive data growth, there is a unique opportunity for MSPs and value-added resellers (VARs) to help their customers manage and protect this most critical asset. Massive volumes of data are required to support mission-critical business processes in an increasingly complex environment, resulting in ramped-up data management and protection requirements.

Unstructured data represents most of today's data explosion, which creates a complex management conundrum. Arcserve will continue to team up with our channel partners to help customers solve this business challenge by implementing the latest and most innovative data management, backup, and recovery solutions.

Arcserve: Investing in Key Technologies

As a result of our product portfolio rationalization since Arcserve's merger with StorageCraft in 2021, we offer a Unified Data Resilience platform that ensures business continuity for customers of our MSP and VAR partners.

For this coming year, Arcserve will continue to focus on executing our product roadmap by adding more engineering resources and investing in areas to enhance the capabilities of the three key pillars of our Unified Data Resilience platform: prevent, protect, and recover.

This end-to-end solution ensures data resilience and effective ransomware protection by seamlessly integrating cybersecurity, backup, recovery, and immutable storage for all data environments. This includes on-premises, off-premises (disaster recovery as a service [DRaaS], backup as a service [BaaS], and software as a service [SaaS]), hyper-converged, and edge infrastructures.

Addressing Your Customers’ Toughest Challenges

This year looks to be a challenging one for most industries. If inflation continues, the pressure will be on MSPs and VARs to reevaluate their operations and determine how to achieve growth in an unpredictable economic environment.

One of the most significant expenses for any of our channel partners is data center costs, including the high costs of storing data in public clouds. Large data centers are raising their fees significantly in response to rising energy prices worldwide. Public cloud prices are predicted to jump by more than 30 percent in Europe and about 20 percent in the U.S. due to spiking energy prices, according to research firm Canalys. On the other hand, rising data center prices could turn into an opportunity for MSPs.

As MSPs transition from the big public clouds and seek more cost-effective, high-performance storage solutions closer to home, they can offer their customers on-premises storage and data-backup solutions, particularly to cost-sensitive SMBs.

Cyber threats, such as ransomware or wipers, will continue to threaten businesses of all sizes for the foreseeable future. But this presents an opportunity for VARs that can work with their customers at all levels of the organization to develop and implement a data resilience strategy that includes disaster-recovery, backup, and immutable storage solutions.

In addition to IT departments, VARs can work with C-level executives and other key groups and departments within the company. Data resilience initiatives face slow adoption in many organizations because they lack champions at the top and buy-in across the company.

Focusing On Channel Partners’ Success

Data is the lifeblood of every business today, making it imperative to protect and ensure the ability to recover this critical asset. Any threat to a company's data, such as ransomware, natural disasters, or human error, is catastrophic. While many companies have implemented backup systems, the real test is whether they can recover that data promptly after a cyberattack or other disruption.

Too many customers believe that disaster preparedness begins and ends with backing up data—and forget that backup alone is not enough. Our channel partners should focus on helping customers quickly recover their data in an emergency. The first step for MSPs and VARs is advising customers to develop a solid recovery plan.

Backed-up data is like a jigsaw puzzle because restoring it without a good recovery plan is like putting together the puzzle without the picture on the top of the box. More time is required, but companies don’t have that time when disruption happens, and their data needs to be restored immediately.

Data Resilience: The Top Priority for 2023

Data resilience is a crucial issue today and a priority for Arcserve as we support our customers and channel partners. If a company loses access to its data due to a cyberattack or natural disaster, it comes to a standstill. Data resilience is not based on a single solution but a set of technologies and strategies that help maintain data availability and ensure it is always accessible.

The Arcserve Unified Data Resilience platform features integrated cybersecurity, data protection, backup, and disaster recovery products, including SaaS backup, unified data protection, immutable storage solutions, and DRaaS. This platform ensures that organizations of all sizes recover quickly and operate continuously through data outages, minimizing disruption or downtime that could result in material and intangible losses to a business.

Another top priority for Arcserve in 2023 is to keep working closely with our channel partners, actively supporting them in growing their business and navigating the current climate of economic uncertainty, tech skills shortage, and the evolving ecosystem.

Arcserve solutions are designed with simplicity and scale in mind to help channel partners ensure their customers' data is secure, accessible, and optimized continually. In parallel, we identify new projects directly and then team up with our partners to help organizations protect their most critical data, which is crucial to their business continuity strategy.

Become an Arcserve Technology Partner

Learn more about the Arcserve partner success program here.